From Success vs. Failure to Vitality: A Smarter Way to Measure Innovation

The Problem We’re Solving

The Binary Is Broken

For decades, manufacturers, retailers, and investors have judged innovation through a binary lens — did the launch succeed, or did it fail? But that framework collapses the moment you look at real-world performance:

• A binary “success/fail” framework no longer reflects how innovation actually performs in market. 

• Innovation metrics differ across retailers, manufacturers, and investors/analysts — and even within a single manufacturer, they differ by brand, category, and geography. 

• Innovations play different strategic roles. A “big bet” designed to disrupt a category cannot be judged the same way as a “quick hit” engineered to create buzz for one season. 

• Organizational decision criteria, resource allocation, and stage-gate processes are still calibrated to outdated definitions of winning. 

Takeaway:  The question isn’t whether it succeeded. The question is: is it alive, evolving, and making an impact?

Why You Should Watch

What You’ll Walk Away With

In this 60-minute session, you’ll learn how to:

• Reframe your innovation scorecard  from a finite “success/failure” verdict to a continuous measure of vitality — growing, evolving, thriving, contributing.

• Benchmark your performance  against country-level and category-level vitality norms across 15 markets.

• Justify innovation investment  to leadership using the finding that manufacturers growing innovation sales were 2.1x more likely to grow overall sales.

• Apply vitality across launch types — from line extensions and new brands to brand extensions.

Who Should Watch

Built for Innovators at Every Stage

This webinar is designed for:

• Innovation, R&D, and Insights leaders  rethinking how they evaluate launch outcomes.
• Brand and category managers  who need defensible metrics for retailer selling stories.
• Marketing and commercial strategists  allocating resources across “big bets” and “quick hits.”
• CPG executives  rebuilding stage-gate processes for the next era of growth.
• If you have launched a product in the last three years — or are planning to launch one in the next three — this session is built for you.

Inside the Session

What We’ll Cover

• Why innovation matters now. The data behind why innovation is the lifeblood of business growth, and the 2.1x advantage manufacturers gain when innovation sales grow.
• The case against success vs. failure. Why a product pulled from shelves after three months isn’t necessarily a failure — and why a product that survives Year 2 isn’t automatically a win.
• Defining and calculating vitality.  A working definition you can apply tomorrow, including how Y1 and Y2 are anchored to distribution and velocity milestones.
• Benchmarks that travel. Vitality rates by geography, by category, by brand size — and what they mean for big, medium, and small manufacturers alike.
• The first-4-weeks rule. Why time is of the essence, where divergence between growers and decliners begins, and how to act on it.